She Doesn't Look A Thing Like Jesus
by Fusionmix
Summary: Michiru's tumultuous orchestra years before meeting Haruka, before her Senshi powers awaken, and before she's even sure of her identity as a mere mortal, let alone soldier. Companion piece to 'Skyline'. Twoshot.
1. Part One

After far too long, here is the companion fic to _Skyline_, written in a style more conducive to Michiru's somewhat un-nerving artistic nature rather than Haruka's more clear-cut and less emotionally open ramblings (guess which one I find easier to write :P). It jumps around a good deal more, being less of a semi-isolated incident and more of a series of possibly-connected vignettes in the life of a teenage musical prodigy that could _possibly _be construed as a coming out story. Of sorts. Now split into two chapters for easier reading!

Along my line before I derailed on a grammar nazi tangent (or possibly cosine), happy National Coming Out Day to anyone it happens to apply to. God bless all you crazy brave-ass people.

More details at the footnote of chapter 2.

* * *

_11:38 PM, Tuesday, June 11_

By the age of 15, she reflects, a good number of the circumstances and events compiled in her life thus far could be described using modifiers ranging from 'daring' to 'blatantly foolish'.

Daring was that first day, when her world denied gods and separated itself into light and dark; through the illumination she subconsciously understood where her talents lay, and followed the trail they paved from her bedroom into her mother's study. She climbed and stood upon the ancient chair, feet crushed into the velvet with a silent gasp of dust and a wooden creak; the girl reached for the uppermost shelf from which she withdrew the last lingering coffin of the past.

Such _drama_. Such pretention. It's addictive to remember petty things in ways that let them pass as grand. She would not have thought the curiosity regarding her late mother's abandoned mahogany cave to be anything more than mundane when she was five.

But today the artist in her remembered it in those flowery terms. The child smiled at the old violin and carried it to her parents, the little girl bowed stoically towards the recital audience with a smaller version of the instrument, the preteen accepted the original, and today the teenager leans against the sink and stares at the face in the mirror that, underneath the mascara and faint blush and coral lipstick, belongs to her. Belongs, or is clutched unto her possession? Perhaps she should redirect her career towards writing. Certainly, it would entail less schlepping about with a pack of other musical prodigies, banging along in a suspension-challenged bus surrounded by the tuba section cleaning spit out of their valves.

She sighs, reaches for a removal pad, and feels very old.

_3:54 AM, Tuesday, June 11_

Absolutely nobody in the hotel room snores. This is an incredible feat, as she'd have guessed that last night's standmate would, judging only by said individual's perpetual allergies. But the girl in question remains entirely soundless, neatly stretched along the three-cushion expanse of the hotel's sofa, which is supposed to fold out into a cot, but is broken, leaving Prodigy Soloist Kaioh Michiru to sleep in a reclining chair and stare at the murky shapes of the other ten girls in the room, none of whom seem similarly stricken by insomnia or crippling loneliness.

She can always tell she's lonely when she actually misses the night two years ago, on tour with the old group in some part of eastern Europe, when percussionist Aoki Hokuto held her hand in the elevator, before she started attracting enough attention to earn a soloist role and propel herself above the 'gofer' status. She was thirteen, and stupid, and they were supposed to go find a crate of rosin in some truck someplace that she couldn't remember, but Aoki had volunteered to show her where it was, so there they were together.

Not that she knew him particularly well, nor was he a stranger, but they had certainly chatted a few times when she had tired of the infantile spats breaking out among her fellow female orchestra members, and had ventured off into the alleyways along the backs of myriad concert halls to breath some comparatively fresh air. It always smelled of cold ozone and pavement, no matter where they performed, but it also held an aroma of clarity that made nerving herself to step out onstage with a thing made of wood—and be expected to generate nice sounds by scraping another thing made of hair across it—bearable.

That was where she first found Hokuto; one year older, a few months into the first wild rushes of testosterone, with his angular elbows, bony hands, and still-soft facial features topped off by a head of childishly bowl-cut black hair. "Kaioh-san," he greeted her respectfully, still surprised when she nearly opened the door onto him. Eventually, the reflex wore off, and he remembered that respect was not the way to behave as a teenage boy, and swept the unfortunate haircut out of his eyes, leaning against the side of the building with his tie nowhere to be seen.

"Aoki-san." His display was not in any way either threatening—or impressive—so she nodded slightly in acknowledgement—reveling in still being about a half-inch taller than he was—and lightly stepped off down the alley to a spot where she could meditate her way into focus.

Unsurprisingly, he followed, at a slight distance of four feet, fumbling a packet from his pocket. "Would you like…I mean, want a cigarette?" His voice had only just begun to break, dropping low without any of the rasp or resonance age and hormones and the smoking would eventually bring him.

"No thank you, Aoki-san."

"Hey," he said nervously, and dropped the cigarette he had been trying to align in his too-large hands. "Hokuto is fine. Really."

She smiled serenely, and asked him what he played; she hadn't seen him before.

"Percussion." The veil he wore finally gave up on maturity and let the little boy come back, at least for a while. "It's hard to see me behind all the stuff, that's probably why you didn't recognize me. Oh, and I also got a haircut because Miya-jun said I looked like the fifth Beatle."

Serenity gave way to an actual expression of mirth, and she forgot about meditation. "Miyaji-san," she emphasized the more correct title for their overseer, "Can be anal at times." It did explain the insipid hairstyle, and as soon as Aoki mentioned it she remembered a boy with a longer-yet-equally-blah haircut swaggering around while casually toting a perpetually-noisy rain stick. Oh well.

For some reason she ended up talking to him again the next day, and a few times on the bus the next week, and so a few months after that first encounter in the alleyway it was not strange that he tentatively reached for her grasp. Their fingers matched a little awkwardly, and it took some rearranging, but eventually they just stood for the remainder of the trip eight floors down, each hesitant to move in case the other might decide to break the tentative lifeline.

They were thirteen and fourteen, and they were stupid, and when they find the crate of rosin on the seat of an old white rental van, Aoki got a few boxes out and stuffed them in a crumpled plastic Tesco bag produced from his jacket pocket, a lonely remnant from another tour. She looked at him for a moment, hand frozen in place as though it still held his, heart oddly still with heat hammering in her face. "How many did we need?"

"Uh. Four. Five for good luck." He dropped another into the bag; it missed entirely, bounced off his shin, and clattered under the truck. "Uh." He said again. They became so quiet, Michiru could hear the sound of the cello section grinding into tune across the parking lot indoors.

"Kaioh-san," he whispered suddenly, and she stopped hearing the unwieldy low 'C'. "Do you ever get stage fright?"

"No," she replied abruptly, the word starting and stopping all in one barky jerk.

"You're really good though. Crazy good. I listened to you practice last night. Well, in the auditorium, when it was empty and stuff, and I think you sound better than Kouga-kun." The name of the current soloist was spoken quickly, but held a gravitas all its own. "I'm not kidding. And he has stage fright so bad he almost pissed himself yesterday when he had to go on because he thought he hadn't practiced enough so that that agent who's stalking us all wouldn't pick him and…"

That time her serene smile was _entirely_ serene in the most horrible way possible. "Hokuto-kun, I cannot quite figure out if you are here to talk about what an overworked, unhappy young man Shinkawa Kouga is, or if you are actually flirting with me."

"Uh," he said for the third time, and a large, stupid grin visible even under the parking lot streetlight spread across his face, because she finally used his given name. They were thirteen and fourteen, and they were very lonely, and late that night after the performance she let him into her dressing room.

The next morning, after she had snuck back into her hotel room, Miyaji woke her up early to tell her that her father was there to speak with her about another agent, who turned out to be the stalker Kouga was trying so hard to impress. Oh well. She briefly felt bad; first because she would be leaving the orchestra for, as Stalker Man says, a 'more talented venue'; and second, Shinkawa's expressive face looked as though it had been erased.

She was thirteen, she was still lonely, and she did not say goodbye to Aoki Hokuto when she left, because vomiting in the bathroom at 0300 hours before slipping out was goodbye enough.

Reflecting back on her makeshift farewell, it occurs to her that she had forgotten to flush.

* * *

At fourteen (and-a-half), she was still stupid, deciding she was going to have a tumultuous affair with Imahara Kakashi, the cellist, an affair tumultuous enough to both shut up the other girls' clueless comments and possibly satisfy that aching _want _in her chest that drives her to fruitless tears at night. Kakashi was two years older than her, worked out when he wasn't practicing, kept himself well-groomed, and his brown hair was parted on the side in the most honest way imaginable. In short, tolerable haircut aside, he was very like posturing, puberty-stricken Hokuto, for entirely different reasons. This time she bothered next to none with buildup, and they skipped the awkward meetings stage entirely, preferring to make out in restrooms, hallways, and even just inside a dressing room whose owner was out to lunch. It was, in fact, more than a little daring.

What remained of her mother's morals screamed at her that this was the part in her life she would look back on as blatant foolishness, but she decided that a real musician ought to have a background for her music, and a tumultuous affair was just perfect for lending passion to each measure. So she played Kakashi into the shimmering eighth notes and the whistling thirty-seconds, blazing from first to third to fourth to sixth position and back again, and managed enough feigned tumultuousness to entirely forget being lonely.

In retrospect, Kakashi was quite the gentleman to allow her to use him for a year, too afraid to commit to him, and too afraid to say she does not want to repeat her mistake with a percussionist from a world that feels far away to her now. Eventually, he too tired of their façade, and so one night she found herself naked, in a hotel bed, with a large, boy-shaped lump on top of the sheets a few feet away and looking at her. The shadows pooled indigo in his face, dripping down the narrow, chiseled musculature of his perfect jaw and into the crevice below his Adam's apple. He wore no shirt.

There and then was the opportunity to properly exercise innate female curiosity by checking for such necessary traits as rippling abs and defined pectorals, but her eyes did not delve below into the deep blue shadows trickling around the highlighted ridges of his collarbone. They froze looking at the polka-dot pattern of the pillowcase where it crinkled and was lost beneath his cheek, so she couldn't count more than ten in each row, and possibly just eight where a column of marching maroon dots met his nose.

He looked back, and she wondered if she was lying on polka-dots as well, and whether he was losing count of them the way she was.

Neither quite knew when or how to begin, but somehow they did, and it was a tangle of awkwardness in which neither managed to make eye contact with the other. Michiru felt as though she ought to put forth more of an effort, and reached for his belt. The shadow of her hand, cast by the lardy yellow glow of the lamp, soars out giant-sized and rippled across the topography of the upset bedding. Halfway to the dim metallic glint-in-the-dark, it was met by a larger patch of encroaching blackness, and stopped. His grip engulfed hers, gently, and she half-imagined their fingers nesting until their palms pressed together; even half-imagining felt like a smouldering leaden weight somewhere in the crevasse of her cringing stomach. But his fingers were too large, so he wrapped them over hers instead, folding them, segmented, into a soft fist which he gently held in place.

"Kaioh-san," he said in that clipped voice she liked to imagine she loved, "I'm very sorry."

"Sorry?" she almost laughed from the absurdity of it all, the bile in her throat rising, because of course she knew this was coming. She was terrified to think that she was relieved. Her heart convulsed—beat?—in a way that wracked her entire frame; the rhythm spun around her like the arms of a galaxy, pinwheeling indomitably around that leaden weight. It contracted violently in protest, just once, for the last time.

He sighed, releasing her hand to roll onto his back, and suddenly she was very aware of the two years separating them. "I should have stopped you earlier," he murmured, and rubbed two fingers around the ridge of his fine-boned brow: a delicate, deliberate motion that only solidifies (in its painful, archetypical way) what she had been suspecting as the reason behind their eleven-almost-twelve months of willing celibacy together. She counted polka-dots. "No, I should have stopped me. This was…"

Automatically, she finished for him. "A mistake." Flat. Emotionless. Her hand was still lost in the no-man's land between them, questing where nerve endings ceased to respond to her attempt at drawing it back.

He looked at her quickly, levering himself upward somewhat with a small repositioning of his left elbow; the bed squeaked incriminatingly, as though attempting to bring the situation back to society's expected course through innuendo. They both ignored the sound. "I wouldn't say that. We're too young." And she fantasized about melting under the piercing dark eyes.

"You mean; I'm too young." _And too female._

"You stopped being young the day you picked up a violin. No, let me restate that. We are too naïve," She could catch a glimpse of somebody else in the fevered, deliberately dramatic rhythm of his speech. He could have recited the Hamlet soliloquy then, and it would have seemed apt with such delivery, "opening the doors others have traveled in hopes of finding a hallway we recognize. I will admit I'm very proud to have had a girlfriend as beautiful at you." His shy, broad grin wished her luck as his words hinted at something they were both too afraid to say. Michiru wished she found that smile irresistible.

The pounding in her chest tripped heavily and landed in a shuddering mess of garbled emotion. Flatlined.

"Come here," he whispered.

He hugged her, and she almost cried (a full-on breakdown to a fellow, but recognizing that was of itself a brutal surrender and affirmation and therefore unacceptable), but Kaioh Michiru does not cry in front of almost-lovers. Never.

She slides her feet onto the floor, rearranges her attire, recites her goodbyes, ensures the door is shut behind her, walks with utmost dignity down the hall towards her own room, and pretends that her heart is breaking.

* * *

_3:58 AM, Tuesday, June 11_

With little ceremony, her self-induced flashback ends. My. How pointless.

A quick glance at the glowing red digits of the clock proves that less than five minutes have passed, and Michiru sighs inaudibly, because somebody has finally begun snoring. Hollow and guttural, the sound swells to fill the sweltering hotel room, and is then drowned out by a rumbling click and the dull, tremulous roar of the air conditioning unit rattling to life. It's quite an old clock; the dots do not blink to mark seconds. The display almost seems to shiver in the swampy blackness, and the longer she stares at it the more the edges of her vision feel as though they are pulling away into a crawling, velvety mass.

She should paint this; she thinks slowly, visualizing the murky browns and blunted purples she would wring out of the shadows. Then, to pull in deeper shades of green and blue to hazily forge the outlines of bedposts and nightstands and the faded, flickering gleam afforded through the closed window where it silhouettes lumpy shapes that may be people.

And right…_there_, she decides, narrowing her eyes into the indistinct gloom, she would emblazon the heartless crimson numerals. Flicker. 3:59 AM. Outside, a car passes, humming a muted note that goes on, and on, and on until part of her brain realizes she is asleep.

Flicker.

3:60 AM.

She can still hear the car—or at least, the memory of it lingers cohesively enough to pass as audibility—droning in the background, and is starkly aware that she is no longer in the hotel room. The baleful digital glare soaks into the world's fibers as though somebody has dropped a glass vial of some blotchy red liquid from a shelf and allowed it to shatter across the pages of a book.

It's not particularly original imagery, some part of her brain protests as the redness sweeps out towards the balding, ruin-speckled horizon. In a movie, she would find it trite and dull, and wonder what society had done to her to make this freakish notion of the entire world being wiped into something so banal. But here, imbedded in the parts of her mind that did not come and go to reason's beck and call, it can tease at the corners of memory and soak her with potentiality.

With this revelation comes the second realization that her view, from the edge of a precipice as the world falls away and burns without a sound, is not an impersonal observation. She watches from her own eyes now, and the heat burns them; she hears the nothingness with her own ears, and it seals them, and people whose faces have no name, but whose names had a face once crumble before the red wave.

It reaches the abyss on whose edge she stands.

Someone screams for her. She doesn't know the name called, only that the splintered voice is stricken in a way that quickens her with baseless sympathy shock, shredded into a pain-shattered _noise _that holds meaning through some context she seems to have overlooked or blatantly forgotten. Regardless, it's the last thing she hears before the tsunami of silence crashes over her. Her ears ring hollowly with the sound of soundlessness. The wave seems to break over her jaw first, snapping her neck back and driving its fist through her sinus cavity and past it into her brain. Blindly, her self fragments. There is no pain.

The world remains black when her eyes open. Hearing another car outside, she half-freezes in the makeshift bed and latches every available waking iota of mental capacity onto that comforting nasal hum. The Doppler effect sets in; the vehicle's complaint fades and is gone with all the reassurance that science and natural laws bring. It's almost as if she forces herself to think of these things in words; they filter through her mind in hollow, id-flavored sensations. _I hear noises_. _It is light out. _Hardly eloquent. She tries to resurrect the night-flavoured and despairing fluency of artistry granted her in the consuming monochrome blackness of early morning, and fails.

There is no more beautiful, tragic loneliness, she cannot dredge up any ache for either Hokuto or Kakashi, and some other girl—banished to blankets on the floor; a fate Michiru does not envy her, and which casts the soloist's own creaky recliner in a more favourable light—is grunting sleepily and awakening with a thump asher knee jerkily meets the wall.

"Mmmwm," murmurs the wall-thumper, perplexed at the sudden assault of physical objects in the unfamiliar room. "Who _put _that there?" She whines this very loudly, probing the still room's atmosphere for attention, which she gets.

Somebody throws a pillow at her. It sails directly past Michiru's face, and she is too groggy to blink, and too awake to really think much of the situation at all. So she yawns, not particularly gracefully _or _elegantly; she leans forward, rude bed protesting wheezily as she braces her hands on its dusty arms. Standing up with an unsteady wobble, she yawns a second time, and trips over to the bathroom. Everybody watches her go, because Kaioh Michiru the Prodigy Soloist hardly seems the type to wake up and go about her morning ablutions like a _normal _girl. After all, Prodigy Soloists typically have their own rooms, away from the unwashed masses.

Unless the manager is stingy and the hotel is too expensive and the venue is small, whereupon even the most prodigiously prodigy-esque of violinists are banished to the mortal realm. She hoped—futilely, she knew—that seeing her here, walking among them as a fellow teenage human rather than some effervescent goddess of musical adroitness, could perhaps quell their rumors. If only gossip were more controllable, and if only Kakashi were not now dating the bassist. Naturally, she was happy for him (which surprised her), but at the same time, her tumultuous affair had come out as a charade pretty quickly.

It _almost _hurt to hear it called that. Imahara Kakashi was gorgeous and polite and even poetically sensitive when the mood took him; overhearing the newer drivel about how she had driven him to the other side of the fence not only was embarrassing, but also far too personal for Michiru's liking. Once, she had spoken with the bass player in question, who had an accusingly denial-penetrating stare amplified by his imperious six-foot height, and whom she did not converse with again.

Some mirrors are meant to be turned face-down and forgotten.

She looks in the one in the bathroom, reaches for the fancily-named cylinder of hotel-granted 'Luxuriating All Natural Sandalwood-Jojoba Facial Wash', and feels very, very old.

* * *

This used to be a oneshot. However, 7000+ words, considering just how much jumping around I do, was too long. Thus, the remainder of the story is split off and now comprises a schnazzy new chapter 2. Thanks to **petiyaka** for inspiring this alteration.


	2. Part Two

Part 2. Nothing much to say here.

* * *

_10:27 PM, Tuesday, June 11_

Another concert. Another recital hall which smells of citrus scented wood polish and clammy paisley-pattern carpets. Another batch of guest musicians to the orchestra, most of whom are older than Michiru and not as good. For the second time in a row at this venue she finds herself playing spitefully, competing with the two girls next to her, whose playing is flawless to the casual listener and tentatively timid—_disgusting—_to the Prodigy Soloist herself.

People are beginning to call her that now, she reflects in between a series of shrieking arpeggios that _sing_ out from her bow, and rather squeak from those of the two beside her. A chance glance at the one with the red streak in her hair betrays a bitten lip and panicked eyes; Michiru smiles, just a little, at her private victory. There is nobody to play for now. But there are certainly people to play against, whether they are aware of her confrontational intent or not.

Redoubling her efforts to the detriment of the unraveling female beside her, she dips into the loneliness with frenzied abandon. It rests just within reach, drifting in the distended, dispersing, gaseous remains lying at the center of her personal galaxy's ring-around-the-rosie circle. She is reminded of a dying red giant star, silently letting go of herself, layer by layer, without fanfare. How pathetic. In the distress of this new metaphor, she actually plays a wrong note.

Someone chuckles, softly, more of a short, mirthful exhalation than anything else. But it rankles, because apparently her brand of psyching out the guest players is not as original as she had hoped, and now one of them has (entirely advertently, she is sure) taken her gun and turned it wrong-way-round in her hands. There is a cold irritation that wells up at this notion—how much worse than lonely it is to be both lonely _and _unoriginal!—but she refrains from turning about in a blaze of aqua hair and gutting the offending chuckler with her rosined rapier. Said individual, viewed from the corner of her eye, is shorter than she. There would be neither honor nor glory in unsolicited homicide if visited upon such a small and insignificant personage.

She knows they were watching her, the same way she watched the two to her right and left. Vengeance or clairvoyance?

She plays no more wrong notes.

* * *

_11:33 PM, Tuesday, June 11_

The girls take almost an hour in the changing room, an hour during which Michiru visits the East bathroom instead, the one nobody goes into because it has a door at its far in which opens into an alleyway. She finds this phobia stupid, because the ignominious gritty-grey brownish door is locked and can only be opened by the cleaning woman.

But tonight she is grateful for her cohorts' fabricated stories of imaginary invading pedophiles, because nobody is here, and she has an entire brooding area to herself. She turns on the lights; the fluorescent bulbs hum for a few seconds before actually flickering to their varying stages of life. The one at the far end of the sinks can't quite drum up the electricity it needs to function, and instead dithers between shades of purple and whitish-pinkish-blue.

Her heels click with tinny echoes on the tile as she flits over to the third sink, right in the middle in its bank of five, and looks up. Makeup immaculate as always, dress perfectly fitted to her slender figure, and everything is still _wrong_.

Of course she likes this bathroom better because it isn't crowded and she can have a whole sink to herself. Naturally, it has nothing to do with the fact that her sink-mates would inevitably bring up her tumultuous non-affair with an outed cellist. They would smile and titter while accusing her, and she would get to hear the whole story _all over again_ about how Kakashi…no, Imahara-kun now…had been so disgusted by her ulterior motives that he had given up women for all eternity. What was most infuriating was the fact that the ulterior motives existed in both of them, but of course the harpies spared Imahara and his stupid boyfriend, possibly because Stupid Boyfriend had a second dan in some form of martial arts, or more likely because they found homosexual relations between two men to be adorable.

Kakashi was on the 'blatantly' end of the 'foolish' spectrum, she decides. Of course, he used her too, the slimy faggot. She starts and braces her hands on the counter, hanging her head down to stare at her distended reflection in the water-spotted faucet.

The words physically _hurt_ to think, setting off a pang in her stomach that causes her to draw a quick breath without really noticing. For a moment she wishes she and Kakashi could switch places. She could hold her big manly bassist's big manly hand and know that if anyone looked at her funny, he would… she struggles to uphold the fantasy. It sputters disconsolately, and flatlines.

Those bitches aren't right just because they've told her this for so long. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes truth, right? No matter; deny a truth long enough and it becomes a lie.

Dear heavens, but that backfired. Uncharacteristically, the slender young woman punches the mirror, fully intending to smash it. She _would_ smash it, slash her wrists in bloody gashes from elbow to palm with a splinter, and lie spread-eagled on the floor for the cleaning woman or the pedophiles or maybe the girls to find. And as she died, she would write down in her own ichors that they were _right_, weren't they? Weren't they happy to be right after all these years? Weren't all those _fucking bitches _so damn happy to be right?

Of course they were wrong, and her knuckles bark backwards unenthusiastically off the shiny surface with a rubbery plastic noise that vibrates all up her wrist. She gives up on the anger and it falls away as she looks up. There is no streakage of her mascara, no smudging of her lipstick. Prodigy Violinist Kaioh Michiru looks back at her, and Michiru can't quite equate the two, and it's a glorious thought. Here she looks for a fulfillment of her loneliness—the ache itself is all she needs. It can be devoured, consumed, vomited up and eaten again in a circle of deliciously self-brutalizing drama.

She is fifteen, isn't she? And she is not daring enough to give up the loneliness, and not foolish enough to try.

_11:37 PM, Tuesday, June 11_

How beautiful it is to feel aged, she reflects, as she reaches for her removal pads (she seems to have brought her makeup kit but cannot for the life of her remember lugging it along, perhaps because she is still in some sort of daze that might be anger). Of course, this isn't how _real _old people feel. This is how a stupid girl who fancies herself tired of life feels. How frustrating,

It takes a minute to remove her pigmented trappings, and then she is still staring at _herself_ in the mirror because nothing changes. She just looks like she isn't wearing makeup. Struck with a sudden, giddy burst of inspiration, she fumbles out the coral lipstick, smushes it determinedly against the glass, and neatly etches out—in perfect cursive—some English. Very few of the girls know English, and the cleaning woman won't either, so absolutely nobody dangerous will get it.

_Goodbye, cruel world_.

She studies her handiwork, stung by the maddening notion that something is not _quite right _about it, and then

_11:39 PM, Tuesday, June 11_

A door opens. The pedophile door. Somebody walks in, yelling, in English, in a voice that could peel paint, murder infants, and throw the entire oboe section out of tune. It's something about someone being an asshole, and Michiru is too dumbfounded to do anything but stare at the newcomer and try to grasp the nature of their entrance.

It's a person she'd place at about 5'2", hair a shaggy mess about the face, body rail skinny and all angles. Someone on the other side of the door screams something, and Shorty deliberately shuts the door and leans against it. It's a girl, judging by soft curve of her nose, though she's taken to wearing the boys' orchestra outfit and her haircut seems designed for the very purpose of obscuring her face. "Hey," she says, still in English. Then, adjusting, she grins slowly and supplements with, "Kaioh-san."

Michiru bows out of reflex, knocking her rear against the counter. "And you are?"

"Second violin tonight."

How awkward. Second Violin exudes some kind of energy which dominates the room, and hasn't stopped that horrible lazy smile yet. Curiously, Michiru inspects it. It reminds her of Hokuto, oddly enough, and she almost forgets to rephrase her question, "No, I'm sorry if I was unclear. I meant your name."

"Do I need one?"

The domination is revealed as what it is, and Michiru smiles back, faintly, the construct as fluid as she can muster. "Good night." She almost leaves the removal pad in the sink in a fit of rebellion, but reflex makes her pick it up anyway.

"Tom."

Oh dear, it _isn't _a girl after all. She's…_he's_…just very young. He must be one of the guest players; a young boy with a frightening talent. No wonder his expression was—hold on. "Tom-san?"

"Tom-kun's A-OK." Still leaning on the door.

"You play violin?" Ugh, foolish question. What else to do as she hovers in the space between exit and little boy? Damn these manners.

He finally gets up, and his shoulders move too much when he walks, as though trying to distract from his hips, which move too much as well. She wonders if she was supposed to notice. "Yes, ma'am," he answers and he walks up and proffers a hand. "Not as well as you. Everything they said about you was true."

Her hand shakes as it grips his. Why is he in the womens' room, she wonders stupidly, even as he doesn't let go. He's still talking, and there's a weird roaring in her ears and the galaxy is spinning again and she's terrified because _did he mean something else did he mean something else when he said that he said they said he knows they said they said_…

"Seriously. You're incredible. I've been scouted for your lot, and I thought _I _was the only one in that league. Good to find someone else." Tom is smiling. It's too wide of a smile, with too many little teeth. It's mesmerizing.

"I don't know what you mean." Even more inane. Somebody named Michiru seems to be talking now. She wished she'd be quiet and give the reins back.

Tom nods towards the mirror. "Seriously, don't do it." He likes the word 'seriously'. "It's selfish and stupid, and you're too pretty. Besides, I tried once, and I cut the wrong way and didn't die, and it gave me parents a horrible fright. It was lame. Don't make my mistakes, girlie."

At some point, he'd let go. "How old are you," she asks, warily.

"Seventeen. I haven't got a real name, and you're suicidal. We match well, huh?"

There is something terrifying in this _person's _gaze. Her—for of course it is a 'her'—eyes are a dark sort of blackish brown, her nose is a little crooked, her jaw is narrow and pointed ahead in a belligerent variant of the classical heart shape, and her hair is black and cut short and shaggy. There is nothing special about her, except maybe that grin. And the aura. Michiru could close her eyes and practically _feel _Tom there. "Match," she whispers, and is vengefully delighted with the connotations.

Someone is _flirting _with her. Flirting. With her. Nobody's flirted with her since a scrawny percussionist a long time ago in a parallel universe where the girls weren't there. Oh, she knows this. It is late, and the loneliness is back, and this gayer-than-rainbows Tom person has a commanding presence that could move mountains and _of course those bitches were right_. Aren't they happy to know they're right.

What a dreadful scene; like something out of a bad late-night lesbian movie churned out by overweight men in ill-fitting business suits to cater to a section of the populace so utterly desperate to see something to identify with that they would accept even drivel like this. Why is Tom even here? Why is this arbitrary stranger here, hitting on her in a way that confirms every one of those terrible taunts. Was it contrived? Did Tom hear from the girls like she said, and come here as a predator?

There are worse things than predators. At this point, there is a person making eye contact with _her_. Not Kaioh Michiru, Prodigy Violinist, but Michiru, lonely idiot closeted so deeply that diamond-tipped drills couldn't dislodge her. "It's okay," whispers Tom, and that stare is intense like a fist driving into her abdomen, wind leaving her body soundlessly.

She knows. Oh, it could take these years, _but she knows and it's okay that she knows, because I know too. _

Tom is still smiling when she steps forward. "Come here."

Michiru does, and drops into the embrace, which is hard and fierce and full of beautiful anger. _I'm such a flaming dyke_, she thinks, and waits for the pain, but there's only Tom, and Tom is like a hundred million layers of diamond armor. She's still smiling, into the side of Michiru's neck just below her jawbone, and it's like the shorter girl is a hundred million feet tall. "I fuckin' hate them too," comes the throaty whisper against her skin, and she trembles. "Look what they did. Making chicks write botched suicide notes on mirrors in bathrooms nobody uses."

Something breaks. "Who were you talking to?" says the Prodigy Violinist, trying to salvage the situation as she backs up abruptly. There is terror in what her host is doing.

Tom pauses, backs away. "What? Before? Some girl who... Damn, I'm really sorry." She's still half-smiling, but there's something else. It's a look she'd seen in Hokuto's eyes. The similarity is still there. "Not used to having such a bad entrance."

"What's your full name?"

The second violinist's grin actually cracks. "Ibuki Tomoko. I like…Tom, better. Don't ask. It's a long story."

Michiru feels herself gaining control back over her limbs, but the nagging _what is this _seems to have gone. "I have a lot of those as well."

Tom jerks her head towards the _Goodbye, cruel world _and raising one eyebrow. The smile returns full-force. "I'd say so. Want to talk about it, Michiru?" The –san drops daringly.

They leave the bathroom together in a blatantly foolish fashion, out the pedophile door and in another that lets them pick up their instruments, and then one last door outside since the orchestra motel is across the way. Michiru holds the skinny musician's skinny hand, and nobody looks at them funny, because nobody is there to look.

Tom is still smiling.

Michiru realizes, at the last minute, when a door that isn't hers is closing behind her, that she wrote the 'y' backwards.

* * *

_5:39 AM, Wednesday, June 12_

Tom was very different than either Hokuto or Kakashi. Kakashi had a gravitas to his movements, and Michiru really never got anywhere she could properly analyze him. Hokuto, though, was over-eager and paranoid that he was doing something wrong. This way or that way? Does that hurt? Oh crap, ow, my teeth (that was when they'd attempted a more involved kiss and failed, rather badly). Then she'd accidentally kneed him in the stomach, which had been interesting.

There is detachment now, as the shower runs in the background (along with it an invitation Michiru declined). She can pick through memories with the unemotional stoicism of a soldier looking through a battlefield for a fallen friend. Perhaps some part of her mind has always been a soldier. Shut off morals, shut off the mind.

She feels filthy, and her hands feel like Tom, and the bed smells like Tom, and she unexpectedly finds herself sliding her feet onto the floor, searching out her attire, ensuring the door is shut behind her, and walking with utmost dignity down the silent halls. All the while, all she can comprehend is the musculature of the female back in comparison to a man's; how the muscles across the shoulders develop different depending on which arm is the bow arm, and how Tom was Tom and had this funny discolored mark stretching from her left ankle in a blotchy pattern to the back of her knee.

The girl also bound, which Michiru found faintly horrifying, especially when a little bit of slanting light from somewhere had illuminated the stretched, crinkled skin around Tom's underarms. No questions were asked, and none were answered. Tom's bizarre, shamed expression when she threw the mess of ace bandage and tape into a corner ensured that, though Michiru did wonder how the older girl managed to breathe.

At some point, she had taken control of the situation, which had surprised her, but more shocking was how Tom laughed when she did—a sort of half-chuckle, more like a startled little breath. That sealed it. Of course Tom had known. Theirs had been no chance meeting. Whoever Tom had had her altercation with outside the pedophile door was unimportant.

She wonders now if Tom had written a cute little script for their fortuitous encounter. And that _smile_ as she followed the damn thing out, possibly word for word. There was no vengeance, but there was clairvoyance, and a player in every sense of the word.

But she still hadn't left. So what did that say about her?

_7:00 PM, Wednesday, June 12_

Of course she is _that kind of girl_, so much _that kind of girl_ that she has absolutely no regrets. In fact, she has no regrets until the duet, when it is Bach's Chaconne foremost in her musician's mind, and she sees her playing partner, still in the boys' suit, and still angular and utterly entrancing beyond belief.

Tom is still smiling, and it is the ugliest thing Michiru has ever seen. _I know who you are_, it says. _Keep waiting for your boy to save you_, it whispers. _Don't worry, I won't tell_.

She goes to bed alone that night, with the door locked, and dreams again of silence. Someone holds her in the spacey half-conscious interim, and she's fairly certain it isn't Tom.

_6:07 PM, Sunday, July 26_

The orchestra is off for break, and in the meantime, she paints. Her first painting is of that hotel room, and is deplorably awful. She has it consigned to a dumpster.

Today, the wind is all wrong for walking about with an unwieldy sketchpad, but she finds herself on top of Suzuka Circuit's bleachers, and there is a car roaring low and growly in the distance, not at all the backdrop she hoped for. But drawing harsh, angular things is not a specialty of hers, so she is _going _to draw a stupid car, no matter how ugly it is. An older man in a baseball cap is holding a stopwatch; the wind catches its string and whips it about until he wraps it around his hand.

Michiru sketches the motion quickly, a 3-second figure drawing that verges on the abstract. Abstraction is a blessing. Now, finally, the racer approaches, and she suppresses the urge to cover her ears when he comes blazing up to the line and doesn't start braking until well past it, very close to her. The car is dreadful. This was a silly idea. She ought to go back now, and stands to do so, one hand protectively raised as her hair flails her face.

The boy gets out of his car, but she already has lost interest, because he's jumping around like a child and hugging the older man-his father, no doubt-while doing some sort of victory dance. Turning, she picks her way out.

The racer below removes her—for of course it's a 'her'—helmet and stares at her, high on victory but a little bewildered. In the time it takes to get the headgear off, Michiru is already gone.

* * *

I almost didn't finish this. I had stopped at the bit about All Natural Sandalwood-Jojoba Crap and undergone a phenomenal bout of writers' block, all thanks to Tom, whose character seemed impossible to write (and I had a great number of inane tense mucking-ups to deal with as well). I will rewrite most of the ending of this. I just wanted it finished—fine tuning can happen later.

I had had the scene with Tom and Michiru in the bathroom planned first – it came to me before anything else in this story did, and brought with it the decision to turn Skyline into the first in a trilogy of sorts. Yet somehow, despite all this pre-planning, I could not write that scene.

So I was browsing the archives as I do when procrastinating, and lit by sheer chance upon the authoress Bainaku (her piece _Morpheus_, to be exact). If you have not read her work, do so now; and if you must read only one piece by her, read _Sky Down_. But her fics in general broke my resolve to write this. I had never managed to find anything written in that style here before, and it quite frankly blew me away.

I almost deleted _She Doesn't Look A Thing Like Jesus_, took down _Skyline_, and cancelled my plans for _On The Back Of A Hurricane_ (the third part, which will be multi-chapter). We have a painfully similar style, so reading over my fics in the name of editing after indulging in hers was, to me, rather like buying store-brand during a recession. It just isn't the same. Then I said 'screw it' and figured I'd finish this anyway, because I'm just not that cowardly.

Be aware that I was not aware of her existence until very recently and any similarities between this fic and any of hers are purely coincidental. ;)

Someday, I aspire to capture the emotion she does. Until then, I hope you enjoyed the second installment in the _When You Were Young _trilogy. Let me know what you think, and then visit Bainaku's profile and review the hell out of her work.

Cheers.

~Mix


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